My practise in broad terms works in the context of the body in relation
to time and space, the spaces or sites I chose to work in are of particular
interest to me in terms of there poetical and time based potential within that
particular space.
I do not consider my work to be about myself, I consider it to be a kind of dance, and an embodiment of various concerns that we experience as human
beings across time – on a personal, social/political level and ethical. I very lightly relate my practice
to Butoh, Butoh is the collective name for a diverse range of activities and
motivation for dance, performance or movement. Butoh was born as a reaction
against the Second World War in Japan; in much the same way that performance
art in the west had a revival following the Vietnam War. Here we see art
become a form of peaceful protest to political authority that harms
individual peoples and environments.
Moving away from political or social authority the emphasis is returned
to the body and place as a tender feeling instrument in a particular context of
situations and environments.
One of the primary inspirations for the Butoh movement, which for me
relates to ideas of shamanism and eastern philosophy, is Kazuo Ohno.
To quote Ohno:
“Dreams play an essential role in our lives. But you can’t go to sleep
deliberately setting out to dream. Continue dancing in that sleep like way.
Don’t think about where to place your feet. While your eyes remain open they
are dreaming eyes”
The quote here moves away from politics into a sensitive spiritual human
body that is responding intuitively and poetically to its context, often in
situations where the individual seems powerless the individual becomes a
transparent spiritual body.
Although I do not consider my work to be about myself I do recognise
that I come from an individual context with experiential concerns. For example, my
grandmothers worked in textile factories, and my dad is a brick -layer. My great grandmother was a medium, my
great-great grandmother was a Native American Shaman, and I myself am female, European Gypsy, and a meditation practitioner.
I consider our own individual bodies to be an intimate musical instrument
of communication with other individuals and places as a universal, mythical method of connecting with each other across time and place without barriers.
Further more, more than an instrument, but music itself. I relate the body to music in the same way that one can
relate nature and the landscape to music.
The body is our primary concrete way of
experiencing impermanence. The
fleeting reality of the ever-passing moment, physical, concrete expressions of
music that cannot be fixed or caught despite the apparent solidity and
strength, always vulnerable, always fleeting and always humble to a larger
expanse beyond itself and oneself.
The body ages, nature changes through seasons, landscapes change as we
move through them, our inner landscapes change depending on our sensory input,
depending on what, who or where we are in contact with.
Although humble and vulnerable to situations, places people and time –
we of course can learn the art of it.
To quote the French Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty:
“Our body is not in space
like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a
hand to an instrument; and when we wish to move about we do not move the body
as we move an object. We transport it without instruments as if by magic, since
it is ours and because through it we have direct access to space. For us the
body is much more than an instrument or means; it is our expression in the
world, the visible form of our intentions. Even our most secret affective movements, those most deeply
tied to the humeral infrastructure, help to shape the perception of things.”
“The body as a visible form of our intentions” is a very clear
expression of what the body is and what performance art can be, and the action
of our bodies that we move as if by magic is the fluid moving visible form of
our intentions.
Getting to the basics of the body is getting to the bare bones of
things, the truth of things – when really feeling a mountain present in your
bones whilst at the mercy of it, or when really feeling a personal/social or
political crises. In these times of humility of environments we are naked and
vulnerable, we are truly human, and it is in these moments of tender and naked humanity
on the edges of things that I am interested.
On these edges of things we touch the aesthetics of disappearance, which
is the reality of the fleeting moment, it is the politics of disappearing
people, places and landscapes and it is the beauty and difficulty in between
life and loss.
In a false contradiction, or at least in a tension with this I’m
interested in when time stands still, when a moment is so significant that it
becomes out side of time, either paused in its stillness or travelling across
time. It is through being one hundred present that this moment can come into being. Think
about the last moment you fell in love with someone across a room, you may never see them again, but in that moment time stood still. Or when you witness
an accident, birth or death in slow motion, or when a childhood trauma or joy is triggered
by events so that you are instantly transported back to that time, and are offered the opportunity to transform it. Or when the
timing of something was so perfect and timeless that it made you stop in your tracks and
just see things with total clarity for a moment.
Like a freeze frame in a film or the still camera of Andre Tarkovsky
filming the movement of grass as the wind blows through it.
The human body, the landscape, place, and embodiment in this way is a
learning of aesthetics, and a learning of ethics which can be positive
transformation for the individual and collective.
People are a crucial factor to my work, whether that be in nature,
the city or a gallery space, whether they be an incidental audience, or an
invited audience. The audience are more like participators of an experience
than spectators, it is a shared human experience in the same way that we pass
strangers in the wilderness of the mountains, or on the edges of the city, we
become a part of the shared experience of the landscape and the unknown depths of each other as human beings across time and space.
The willing participation creates the situation for something a little ineffable to happen, something that feels like transformation, something that feels significant, but often in a way that is hard to define, and often in a way that is challenging to the audience as it asks for a trust, and a letting go into an experience in which one does not know what will happen, one does not know what that deeper insight will look or feel like or how it will effect us as participants of an experience that is at least a glimpse of something a little more than our individual selves.
Becky lives in a disciplined studio apartment based on the leafy city edge of Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
beckybowley@googlemail.com